Why Beautiful Things Make Us Happier
In collaboration with creative agency Sagmeister & Walsh, Kurzgesagt explores what beauty is and how it makes people happier. This Atlantic piece is a good companion piece that summarizes some of the research done about beauty’s connection to happiness.
The usual markers of happiness are colloquially known as the “Big Seven”: wealth (especially compared to those around you), family relationships, career, friends, health, freedom, and personal values, as outlined by London School of Economics professor Richard Layard in Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. According to the Goldberg study, however, what makes people happiest isn’t even in the Big Seven. Instead, happiness is most easily attained by living in an aesthetically beautiful city. The things people were constantly surrounded by — lovely architecture, history, green spaces, cobblestone streets — had the greatest effect on their happiness. The cumulative positive effects of daily beauty worked subtly but strongly.
See also Richard Feynman on Beauty.
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